Curating emancipatory praxis: Exhibition as method

Interpretive consumer research has championed alternative qualitative methods to advance marketing theory. This canon of research has provided alternative expressions of various consumption experiences and new ways of fostering knowledge in a well-established tradition of methodological emancipation. In this paper we advance this canon by introducing exhibition as method to consumer research. To do so we discuss our use of exhibition as method in a project entitled ‘The Marketplace & I’. Our offering of exhibition as method invokes curation theory and structurally guides consumer researchers who wish to draw on exhibitions as an alternative mode of qualitative research. We subsequently demonstrate how the utility of exhibition as method can move consumer research more readily from methodological emancipation towards ‘emancipatory praxis’ where our research efforts are made more accessible to broader audiences outside of academia.